VA Receives $233M from Congress for EHR Update with Conditions

Congress has given $233 million in its last fiscal year 2016 omnibus bill for sustained modernization of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ VistA EHR network. Although, the appropriation—signed into law by President Obama—comes with few conditions and restrictions.

The EHR enhancement attempt, called the VistA Evolution program, calls for the addition of an Enterprise Health Management Platform (eHMP)—a set of latest modular-based sections—to replace the Computerized Patient Record System, which is the existing user interface that clinicians utilize while delivering care. Among other functions, the latest eHMP platform will enable the VA to meet several of the 2014 Edition Meaningful Use certification criteria for HIT sections.

Although, legislative language bounds the use of congressional funding until VA indicates functional improvements in the interoperability of the network to seamlessly exchange veterans’ medical information among the VA, Department of Defense and the private sector.

Not more than 25% of the funds can be obligated or spent until the VA Secretary submits a report to both House and Senate appropriations committees giving specifics on the scope and functionality of projects within the VistA Evolution program, involving proposed alterations to the program as well as the milestones and timeline linked with acquiring interoperability.

Lawmakers are specifically fascinated in the definition being utilized for interoperability between DoD and VA EHR networks, the metrics to measure the extent of interoperability, and the growth toward establishing and implementing all components and levels of interoperability involving semantic interoperability.

However, DoD and VA have devoted to acquiring interoperability between their separate EHR networks, the 2 departments sustain to miss significant deadlines and have yet to develop outcome-oriented targets and metrics for measuring their growth toward interoperable EHRs, in accordance to an August 2015 audit by the Government Accountability Office.

In accordance to GAO, DoD and VA missed an Oct. 1, 2014, deadline developed by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2014 to certify that entire healthcare information in their networks complied with national standards and were computable in actual time.

Auditors also disclosed that a number of important activities in the departments’ network modernization policies will be executed beyond Dec. 31, 2016, the target time established in the NDAA for DoD and VA to deploy modernized EHR software to motivate clinicians while making sure complete standards-based interoperability.